One of the most distinctive characteristics of Bridget Riley's art is that it "insists" with such concentration that it changes sensory response into something else.

The experience which Riley offers is closely related to the expression of emotion or, more exactly, to the creation of visual analogues for sharply particularized states of mind.

The very intensity of the assault which her painting makes on the eye drives it, as it were, past the point at which it is merely a matter of optical effect.

It becomes acute physical sensation, apprehended kinesthetically as mental tension or mental release, anxiety or exhileration, heightened self-awareness or heightened awareness of unfamiliar or even alien states of being.